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May 31, 2000

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May

May 31, 2000
The US Supreme Court has denied the birth mothers' appeal so birth certificates go out to adoptees who want them beginning almost immediately. I've been able to clarify my own position on this in recent days, though I wouldn't describe it as set in stone.

I continue to think that the adoptees should have access to biological family medical histories, and I'm at the point now where I think even access to the birth certificates may be an OK thing.

I'm disturbed that this violates promises made to birth mothers, but there's little that can be done about that at this point. Best case scenario: The contact form that the birth mothers can put in their file spelling out whether they want contact with their biological children should be a legally binding document rather than its current next-to-meaningless status.

My long-standing worry has been that this law will dissuade mothers from putting their babies up for adoption or, god forbid, will increase the number of abortions. I'm now hopeful that we'll get another result from this ballot measure: an end to any social stigma attached to adoption. As a society we've dropped the social stigma from so many activities and events that rightly deserve to be shunned and frowned upon that it seems utterly backward that putting a child up for adoption should carry with it any social stain.

It'll probably take a few years, but eventually we'll see if that optimistic view of the ballot measure's effects is warranted, or if I'm just viewing the world through rose-color glasses again.

May 29, 2000
Dave brought up his G3 last night and we setup an ethernet network and tested out FireWire Target Disk Mode. Good news. It worked perfectly, and this time without smoke rising off of Trinity's motherboard.

Ultimately we spent much of the night playing QuakeWorld and Carmageddon, the latter being one-half brilliant race car game and one-half morally repugnant Death Race 2000-inspired crap. As a single player game, it's not worth the time of day. As the multiplayer, well, let's just say that the last time Dave and I got together we stayed up all night playing it. This time we forced ourselves to quit at 3:30 AM.

Dave, Erin and I headed to Rock 'N' Rogers, a '50s/'60s joint, for breakfast. Good atmosphere. A little expensive. Large portions. Good food.

Bret came down in the afternoon to move more of his stuff in. We ended up shooting hoops in the park for an hour or so which wasn't great exercise but was a heck of a lot more fun than, say, running on a treadmill. Bret's formally moving in on June 10.

Bought my ticket from PDX to San Jose for the first leg of the France trip. Can't believe we're only 26 days away.

May 28, 2000
Dennis held a real cool get-together/dinner last night with Matt, Ginger, Joe, Carol, Erin and me. The food and conversation were both, as one might expect, excellent. I'd seen Dennis' apartment before when we ran a 5k in Portland a few months ago, but this was the first opportunity for many others to glimpse the excellent setup that Dennis has going.

The Oregonian printed my letter to the editor broadly condemning the pro-Microsoft commentary they'd run the week before. They edited the bit which said it was essentially impossible to respond to all the points raised, but they got the gist of it I suppose. The stuff they took out appears here in brackets:

I knew I had a pretty good shot of getting this published given its rather jocular tone and wide-ranging vocabulary. That typically proves an irresistible combination to newspaper editors—I used to be one, so trust me, it's true.

May 26, 2000
Well that didn't take long. Trin returned this morning via Airborne Express, meaning the turn around from my house to Apple's Houston repair facility and back again was about 36 hours. That's pretty sweet work. Hopefully I get the chance to test the FireWire stuff this weekend.

I headed up to Portland's Ash Street Saloon to hear loligo rock the joint. The venue has really improved their sound system dramatically and the band was really sharp. They play next at Mt. Tabor on June 6 at 9 PM.

May 24, 2000
I shipped off Trinity today, but, God willing, the return time will be short and I'll have my PowerBook back by Friday. Frankly, I think it's more likely to be next Tuesday, but I'll survive either way. Ol' Zeke here is doing just fine.

I picked up my France tickets this morning, so I guess we'll really be going after all. Hard to believe that after more than six years of talking about it and several aborted attempts that we're really going to go for it. Of course, the other half of me is thinking ,"About time."

I just found out about our friend Debi's web site. Learn all about her, her husband Maurice, and their dog Lucy at www.drlemon.net.

May 22, 2000
We celebrated my mom's birthday yesterday with a brunch out at Edgefield. Good food. Also a remarkably transformed area, with a golf course, several restaurants, gardens, various shops, and so on. Mom, Bret, and I had a good time just walking the grounds, but the brunch and the after meal conversation was great too. Happy birthday, Mom!

I spoke with Apple Support this morning and Trinity is headed back to Apple for repair to the FireWire ports. I'll get to keep my same LCD screen (which is terrific since it has no dead pixels) and my same hard drive (which is also terrific since it means I won't have to reinstall everything). They'll probably just replace the FireWire componentry—which is apparently modular according to the guy I talked to—and ship Trinity back. Should have the PowerBook back by early next week.

Erin described her Ashland trip as good but not great. She got to see her friend Terri on the way down, and she loved that. But her arrival in Ashland was less that thrilling. The Ashland Motel where she made reservations earlier in the week initially declined to give her the quoted price. Only when Erin whipped out her notes from the phone call did the manager relent, and then proceeded to stick her in what was probably the worst room in the place. (By which I mean leaky faucet, holes in the wall, etc.) So please put the Ashland Motel on your do not frequent list.

Erin really enjoyed the play, Forces of Nature, that she saw Saturday night. I hopeful that next year I'll be able to drive down with her if she decides to go.

May 20, 2000
Bret came down from PDX and we moved some more of his stuff in. Had some time left over so we went to the park and played hoops. Now my knee is sore (same patella tendon problem that he's about to have surgery for). I've never had any knee issues whatsoever, so this is annoying, but I'm sure a couple days of rest and it'll be fine. It's not like I tore an ACL or something.

Erin's down in Ashland at an English educational conference. Back tomorrow.

Picked up the newly repaired bath fan, featuring a new and quieter motor. Installed without a hitch. In limited testing, it appears to work great.

I watched Air Force One on ABC, the first network TV movie I'd seen in years. It'll also be the last. This severely edited flick wasn't great to begin with, but the extended commercial interruptions were awful and so many of the ads were for ABC itself or for Disney (the relatively new parent company) that I thought I'd throw up. These ads weren't little 30 second spots either. Usually they were a couple minutes in length, and just about as boring a thing as I think I've seen. Network television: What a wasteland.

May 19, 2000
After staying up most of the night, Dave and I headed up to Fry's Electronics in Wilsonville so I could buy a FireWire cable and so that we could peruse the store. Came back to Salem where we did a quick run to SiteRev.com's credit union for a deposit, to the hardware store to drop off the still-causing-me-headaches bath fan, and to The Computer Store to do more Macintosh perusing.

Hugely bad news of the day: Attempting to use FireWire Target Disk Mode between Dave's G3 and Trinity, Trin's FireWire port crackled a bit and then started smoking! I didn't know that they meant FireWire literally! Anyway, the upshot is that Trin's FireWire controller chip or port or something now fails the hardware diagnostic. I'll be calling Apple Support on Monday, but I'm guessing that I'll have to send Trinity back for repair. On the brighter side, other than the FireWire thingy, the computer still runs perfectly.

[For those who are wondering, we didn't do anything wrong with the FireWire hookup. The PowerBook was off and FireWire is a hot-swappable connection anyway. Trin's port or controller was just bad. Glad to find this out now instead of later.]

May 18, 2000
Dave is here! Dave is here! And man alive the things we're accomplishing. We started by messing around with the lawn mower that Garr gave Erin and me and got it running, though not smoothly or well enough to use. We'll need to get it in for a tune-up, but we knew that already. Eventually we went over to my parents' and borrowed their lawn mower to get the lawn cut. Looks great, of course.

Dave then fixed our edger and I grabbed a hoe, and we edged around our lawn. Hasn't looked that good since we moved in, frankly.

We then Shop-Vac-ed the attic above the garage clearing it of cobwebs and dust so that we could store a bunch of gear up there. This in turn allowed us to park both our 626 and Dave's Jeep in the garage, which was a novel event in that we've never had two cars in here before. Fit pretty well, actually.

After dinner we headed to the office to set up a LAN. With Trinity serving, we got Internet and file sharing working for both Zeke and Spook, Dave's B&W G3/300. It was pretty cool to be able to pull down Internet traffic (and play QuakeWorld online) from any machine (including Trinity). What's more, we were able to keep the firewall in place so that unauthorized and nefarious types weren't allowed access.

Not bad for half a day's work.

May 17, 2000
There's an old saying that all politics is local, and if that's true than I really don't have too much to complain about in yesterday's elections. All my Salem-area candidates won and all the Salem-area ballot measures won and lost as appropriate. It's rare for me to see so much ballot box success. Things went slightly less well at the state level, but not so badly that I'm complaining. On the whole, I'm very pleased with yesterday's results, and that's the first time that's happened in years. (Of course I'm blocking out of my mind the fact that I consider both the presidential candidates to be less than stellar options.)

One of the statewide measures passed by voters a few years ago (and in courts ever since) allowed adoptees access to their birth records over the wishes of the birth mothers. While presenting an interesting privacy case, the birth mothers' appeals have been rejected at every state court level. The temporary injunction runs out May 30, though there may be a continuation while the mothers' appeal to the US Supreme Court. Odds that the case will even be heard at that level are pretty slim, however.

Personally, I think the ballot measure is an unwarranted privacy intrusion and an awful law. It seems terribly unfortunate that some middle ground can't be found here. Without question adoptees should have access to familial medical records, but I'm very skeptical that there is or should be a right to know one's birth parents. In fact, I'd be inclined to argue that the First Amendment's right of free association also includes the right to be left alone which seems to me to be the prevailing principle. I've not come to a solid position on this yet (in part, I'm sure, since I'm not directly effected), but it'll be interesting to find out if this adventure eventually sees a bunch of birth mothers filing restraining orders against their biological children.

May 15, 2000
The Davison clan headed to Rainbow Cafe in Troutdale yesterday for a Mothers' Day breakfast in honor of Mom and Grandma. Happy Mothers' Day to Moms everwhere!

I've been working on yet another in what's now a very long list of songs. This latest, Battlefield of Love, is darker musically and lyrically than most, but I'm sure I'll put a happy face on it in the end. Ultimately, my stuff is just too relentlessly optimistic (and perhaps I am as well) for it to end as a downer. I started with e minor and the lyric "In this battlefield of love something beautiful once grew" and just went banging away at different chord progressions. It'll be interesting to see if I can make this into something.

May 12, 2000
Believe it or not, but after today Erin has only five weeks of school left. That was almost shocking to me when I discovered it. I guess it just crept up on me; not surprisingly Erin says she's been fully aware of how many days are left.

While it might sound strange, Erin and I have begun discussing our post-France plans. So much of our "life roadmap" (or whatever you want to call it) centered around this France trip (and for so long) that the post-France plans were left rather vague.

Unless something dramatic happens, Erin will be a Sprague again next fall, and I will be attempting to add clients for my web design business. This fall/winter I'll also be looking to buy a keyboard amp for my Roland XP-80, a mic, and vocal amp so that I can start having musicians over to play some of my songs in preparation for formal recording. That would've happened last year, but we bought a house instead. (Which sure seems like a fair trade to me.)

Summer of 2001 we'd like to take a trip back east to see friends and relative and visit some national historic sites. Also in 2001, we'll look to take some basic remodeling steps with the house. Not quite sure what those items will be exactly or what kind of budget we'll have to work with, but there's some time yet to figure that out.

May 10, 2000
I headed up to Portland to see Garr and troubleshoot what little needed it on his G4. In the end, I updated one program that was having incompatibility issues. Everything else was running great, and his new DSL connection was pretty nifty too.

Many thanks to Garr and Terri for their gift of a lawn mower. It's an older Briggs & Stratton model, but it should be perfect for our little patch of grass in the front yard.

May 9, 2000
Got a call from my travel agent today. Apparently there's a $25 charge for credit card payment versus cash. I informed her that it was against VISA merchant rules to discriminate on the basis payment method, but she was unpersuaded. Given no choice, I said, "Fine, charge the card," and then called VISA. Yep, against the rules all right. So I'll be disputing the $25 charge when it comes down the line and if I'm feeling particularly annoyed I may even file an incident report. (That seems like a bit of hassle, though.)

After tweaking my back playing hoops a few weeks ago, I've returned to regular treadmill running. It's hardly what I'd call fun, but on the upside, I'll probably have the lyrics to my Van Halen 1984 workout tape memorized before the week's through. (Hot for Teacher is, for obvious reasons, a particular favorite.)

May 7, 2000
Erin and I managed to get in a little gardening work today, a task she enjoys and I find neither taxing nor exciting. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon, I guess is how I feel about it, and what the heck, the garden needed the work. If all goes well, we should see some strawberries this year. (Or we would if we weren't in France.)

The France tickets are now confirmed and aside from my one-way ticket from Portland to San Jose (which will be easy enough to acquire), everything is set to go. Erin's trip routing is the logical progression of San Francisco to London to Paris. Mine is the far more curious San Francisco to Cinncinati to Paris. As I may have mentioned, Erin's ticket was free thanks to frequent flier miles (most of which were accumulated through a deal with our VISA card company). To match her ticket—meaning to have me fly with her) would've cost $1,245. My trip via Cinncinati will run $885 + $82.50 for the ticket to San Jose. I'm not sure yet what type of Eurorail passes we'll get, but I'm sure we'll snag something. I'll be publishing a more complete itinerary of everything online once the date draws nearer.

I've requested an application for the Salem Police Department's Citizen Police Academy, a community policing program which educates citizens on the various police services and practicies. They run the 11-week sessions twice per year and enrollment is limited (so there's no guarantee I'll get in), but it sure seems like a great opportunity to learn more about working with law enforcement personnel to make the city a safer place. If accepted, I'd start the classes in the fall. (This is not a prelude or initial step for becoming a police officer, in case that's what it sounds like.)

May 5, 2000
Missed last night's five(!) overtime Penguins loss to attend a loligo concert in Portland, and given the result it's probably just as well. The Pens are now 2-2 in the series with both losses in OT.

The loligo concert featured new songs, a new bass player, and a new Ash Street sound system. The result was a little ragged at times, but there were plenty of magical moments, and the new bass player is excellent. For those interested, loligo plays again at Ash Street on May 25 at 9 PM. Email if you'd like to carpool or meet me there.

I've now moved all command and control functions to Trinity, my new PowerBook. Zeke's hardly going by the wayside, though. He's in charge of all of Erin's stuff, printing, scanning, analog audio and video, and file backup. I've got a lot of prep work to do yet to make this set up as fully functional as I want, but it's pretty fun work, I've got to admit.

How about that LoveBug (aka "ILOVEYOU") virus? Anybody else really happy not to be running Windows and Outlook? The only thing that bothers me with these viruses is when the media coverage neglects to mention that Macintosh, Solaris, and Linux (and any other operating system other than Windows you can name) are unaffected.

There's a lesson in there, and it's not, as some have suggested, that Windows sucks. (That's true, but that's a different lesson.) It's that Microsoft, as a general rule, considers security the purview of the end-user. Microsoft products, generally speaking, offer security of a Swiss cheese-like nature, and if security is at all a concern of yours—and if you think it's not, you haven't been paying attention—then it seems obvious that the solution would be minimally to use an email client other than Outlook. (My vote, for what it's worth, is for Eudora Pro.)

May 3, 2000
Thanks to everybody who has been writing me with congratulations on the new PowerBook. It's nifty and exciting, and I'm eager to introduce it to you.

I booked my half of the France trip today. Erin and I have decided to save $275 and fly separately, figuring that the temporary inconvenience is worth the money. (That's a lot baguettes and cheese.)

I'm planning on continuing the web site updates from France, though pictures will have to wait until we return since I don't have a digital camera yet. I don't know how available Internet access will be over there, but I've ordered a laptop travel kit (with appropriate adapters and such) for France so that I can keep things running as needed.

I've also ordered an iMate, a USB-to-ADB adapter, which should let me use my full size keyboard and Kensington Orbit trackball. The built-in keyboard and trackpad are fine for on the go, but when I'm working here, I prefer the equipment I'm used to.

Some people have expressed security concerns (hi Mom!) about the PowerBook, and though the pretty little things are thief magnets, I've taken (or will take) three steps to bolster security. First, I'll be buying a carrying case which doesn't look terrifically like a laptop case. It'll still need to look reasonably professional of course, but no need to advertise that I'm carrying $3k worth of computer. Second, I'm buying a Kensington micro saver, a special laptop lock and chain. A determined robber could still steal the thing, but the casual quick-swipe artist is out of luck. Finally, I've installed PowerOn Software's DiskLock, a password and encryption program which will basically stop anyone but me from using the machine. Even if the PowerBook is stolen it will be functionally worthless to whoever takes it.

But I'm still gonna get it insured.

May 1, 2000
On of the perks of having an Internet-based job is that you find a lot of really neat time-wasting stuff. Case in point: Scott R. Kurtz' Player versus Player daily comic. Like any humorous endeavor, the strips can be hit-or-miss, but the hits are pretty darn funny. Here's some of my favorite takes: Palm Pilots, male-female tech geek relationships, male psychology, online chats, The Phantom Menace, software piracy, Quake, marriage, employer-employee relationships, Star Trek: Voyager, Christmas wishes, cleaning, Xena: The Warrior Princess, Jesus, The Matrix, Linux, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (click next cartoon to go through the AD&D series—it's great!), and Macintosh computers.

Speaking of which, FedEx tracking late last night came up with the following:

Soon...very soon. (drool, drool, drool)

Update: Looks like the PowerBook is in Salem and on a FedEx truck as of 25 minutes ago:

Looks like I may have it today after all.

Update 2: And indeed, I do. The FedEx guy drove right past our place this morning much to my frustration, but a quick call to FedEx ("Yes, I watched him drive right by") had him back in my neighborhood within 90 minutes. (PowerBook details will be posted in the Mac section.)

Initially, I suppose he might have been scared off by all the PGE workers who busied themselves replacing the transformer on the pole at the end of our driveway. I'll be happy if this means no more charbroiled squirrel (especially since we're all out of A1 Steak Sauce).

The boom of the transformer blowing yesterday apparently freaked all the sugar ants and they've invaded our kitchen area yet again. We're beating them back with a boric acid/Raid combo that's proving effective.

The cleaners were out this afternoon to move stuff back to the living room and steam clean the carpets and chairs. It's taken longer than expected, but truth be told, the house is better than it was before the fire (new paint job, new thermostats, additional smoke alarm, etc.).

For my good deed of the day, I helped my neighbor Fred get his new Compaq Presario PC running (even though it violated my long-standing pledge to leave all PCs the hell alone). It had crashed to the point where the machine couldn't see the hard drive. Three months old, this Compaq. Is a hardware problem? A software problem? Who knew?

Not Compaq tech support, that's for sure, but it didn't mean they couldn't read me their "to do in case of catastrophic hard drive failure" list. After wading through the deepest voice mail system I've ever encountered (yes, more maddening than even the IRS system), I finally got to talk with the high school age-sounding "Heather" who, though she couldn't fix a computer to save her life, certainly could and did read me the items on Compaq's tech support fix-it list. And, what do you know? It worked, making me a hero in the eyes of Fred and his wife for nothing more than exhibiting a casual banter with the tech support personnel and pressing a few buttons. Don't feel like I did all that much, but I was happy to be of service!

We priced the cost of me matching Erin's itinerary to France: $1245. Still have our travel agent pricing other options, but initial range on flying solo is $900-$950. That $300 savings might be sufficient to make us take different journeys to the same destination, no matter that we'd obviously prefer to fly together.

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